Healty Food Festival (sic)

Today I got an e-mail invite for the "Healty Food Festival" which I totally deleted because I couldn't figure out who it was from and I didn't appreciate the misspelling. Then at 12noon these students I've been helping do research for the last month came RUNNING into the library shouting Miss! Miss! Miss! Why haven't you come to the healthy food festival?!?!

I had to scan my brain to even remember the e-mail and then put 2 and 2 together.

"Oooooohhhhhh," it dawned on me. "That was you guys?!"

...and before I could even close my laptop and grab my coffee off the desk they were hurriedly ushering me out of the library to the classroom where they had this whole huge array of healthy Arabic foods they had prepared or bought to show off what they had learned recently about nutrition.

It was DELICIOUS! I had some spicy pasta stuff, and some rice stuff, and some chicken sauce stuff, and some grape leaves, and some pancakey thingeys with cheese, and some tea with milk. I have never seen most of these foods before and the students assured me that they were all arabic foods. What an insight. Delicious. Did I say delicious?

There were a few other faculty there as well and we all sat and ate and had a nice chat about their recent trips to America and how they cook and whatnot. These students are very pleased because I can pronounce their names correctly and their regular teacher cannot. :) All those hours repeating gutteral sounds alone at home until I got them right are really bearing fruit. I also learned that a guy who teaches at the college, named McDermott, when his name is translated into Arabic, comes out "Makadermoot', which means "incapable of dying". Amusing.